NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, in an interview with
the President that was aired on Friday's Today show, actually questioned
Barack Obama about his controversial recess appointment of the
pro-health care rationing Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare,
something, as
BiasAlert has documented the networks have vastly ignored.
However, Todd never explained to viewers why the President's opponents
were upset by the appointment, and instead gave him an excuse to say the
move was just his way of getting around a failed political system as he
asked the following:

Do you think Washington is broken?
And the reason I ask you this, because when you appointed - you did the
recess appointment of Donald Berwick. You seemed to send the message of
one of two things. Either you didn't want to debate about health care
again on Capitol Hill, which got a little raucous a year ago or you know
what? "The Senate process is broken and we gotta go around it?" [audio
available here]

When the President responded that
he couldn't afford to "Play political games with the Senate," something
he himself did by using the recess appointment, Todd didn't call him on
it, choosing instead to ask, once again, if Washington was "broken?"
Todd also could've highlighted the President's personal hypocrisy on
this issue - a point even the liberal
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus caught - as in 2005, when
George W. Bush recess appointed John Bolton to UN ambassador, a then
Senator Obama claimed: "To some degree, he's damaged goods."

The
following is the full interview as it was aired on the July 16 Today
show:

MEREDITH VIEIRA: The situation in the Gulf is not the
only thing on President Obama's mind. The economy is still lagging.
November's midterm elections are fast approaching and his facing, he is
facing falling poll numbers. NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck
Todd sat down with President Obama on Thursday. Chuck, good morning.

[On
screen headline: "Obama One-On-One, Can President Bring More Jobs Back
To Economy?"]

CHUCK TODD: Good morning,
Meredith. Well, as you know, the President has had a hard time
convincing the public that his economic policies, including that
trillion dollar stimulus plan, has been working. He's been making almost
weekly trips to the heartland to try to promote it. Yesterday it was
the groundbreaking for a car battery plant. That said, he acknowledged
that the economy still has a long way to go.

BARACK
OBAMA: The main thing that keeps me up at night right now is we lost
eight million jobs. The month I was sworn in, we lost 750,000 jobs.
We've regained about 600,000 this year so far, and if we stay on pace,
hopefully we'll gain several 100,000 more, but making up for that eight
million is going to be a challenge. Look nobody in the White House is
satisfied with where we are right now. What we absolutely are convinced
of, though, is that we're on the right track and I think that the
statistics bear that out.

TODD: What do you
tell, tell the person [who] may have voted for you-

OBAMA:
Right.

TODD: -can't find a job or got laid off
since you took office, why they should still keep the Democrats in
charge?

OBAMA: If somebody is out of work right
now, the only answer that I'm gonna have for them is when they get a
job. Up until that point, from their perspective, the economic policies
aren't working.

TODD: Yeah.

OBAMA:
That's my job as, as president, is, is to take responsibility for
moving us in the right direction.

TODD: You talk about a choice
election this fall, are you prepared for the fact that now that means
your policies, it's a referendum on you, and your policy, and that the
voters may say, "You know what, we're putting the Republicans in
charge."

OBAMA: This is going to be a choice
between the policies that got us into this mess and my policies that are
getting us out of this mess. And I think if you look at the vast
majority of Americans, even those who are dissatisfied with the pace of
progress, they'll say that the policies that got us into this mess, we
can't go back to.

TODD:
Do you think Washington is broken? And the reason I ask you this,
because when you appointed - you did the recess appointment of Donald
Berwick. You seemed
to send the message of one of two things. Either you didn't want to
debate about health care again on Capitol Hill, which got a little
raucous a year ago or you know what? "The Senate process is broken and
we gotta go around it?"

OBAMA: You know the fact
of the matter is, is that I can't play political games with the Senate
on these issues. I've got a government to run. And at a certain point we
have to go ahead and just make sure that people are in place to deal
with the enormous challenges that are ahead.

TODD:
So you're not ready to say Washington is broken?

OBAMA:
Well, here, here's what I'm ready to say, that Washington has spent an
inordinate amount of time on politics. Who's up, who's down? And not
enough on how are we delivering for the American people? The good news
is that despite no cooperation from the other side, we have over the
last two years stopped an economic freefall, stabilized a financial
sector. When people are determined and are willing to take tough votes,
even when it's politically inconvenient we can still get things done.

[On
screen headline: "Obama One-One-One, Will President Go On Vacation In
The Gulf?"]

TODD: I gotta leave it there but
vacation in the Gulf? I know the First Lady was down there, touting it,
in Panama City, Florida. Are we gonna see you guys down there?

OBAMA:
You know we're gonna be trying to figure out, where we're gonna be able
to take some time over the course of the summer. But a month of it is
gonna be taken up with Malia going away for camp, which she's never done
before.

TODD: A little anxiety?

OBAMA:
And I may shed a tear when she's on the way out.

TODD: Well,
the President did comment on one foreign policy challenge and that is
this al Qaeda franchise that's in Yemen. He was not ready to say that
the U.S. would have to take more military action down there. They have
been doing some co-op cooperative attacks with the government of Yemen.
But he did describe the place as being very similar to Afghanistan. And
of course, Meredith, that's not exactly the best comparison.

VIEIRA:
Not at all. Chuck Todd, thank you very much.

-Geoffrey
Dickens is the Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. You
can follow him on Twitter here

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